By: Robin Ford Wallace, Reporter
The object is shaped like a cowboy boot complete with spurs. It is crisscrossed by a gunbelt with holster and ammo, and it is topped with a cowboy hat. Surmounting all, a bulb and shade hint at its practical use: It is a reading lamp.
Sound like something you can’t do without? Then hurry on down to Rising Fawn, where Deborah Johnson of Circle A Horse Company will be happy to make you a deal. She is holding a fire sale each Friday, Saturday and Sunday until everything goes – a process she envisions might take until well past Christmas.
“This is the third weekend and I’ve been doing really well,” she said during an interview on Friday. “But you see I haven’t even made a dent in it.”
Indeed, the cavernous spaces of Circle A are still jam-packed with All Things Western: hide-on-hair beds, night stands, chests and couches; teak rockers; ladder chairs; a bar table and stools with animal-horn legs; and virtually everything that can be imagined to be made from, or decorated with, wagon wheels.
There are Navajo pottery and turquoise jewelry. There are ponchos, shawls and fringed jackets. There is a statuette of a cobra in strike position and a fully restored 1917 Ford Model T taxi that you just have to ask is also for sale. “It will be,” says Ms. Johnson. “It all has to go.”
Ms. Johnson enjoyed collecting all these treasures with her impulsive late husband, Eugene Johnson, who died in an automobile accident in May 2010. But now in her widowhood she wants out of the retail business, and since a Dade Superior Court judge in July lifted an injunction that in effect closed her down, Ms. Johnson has gone through the inventory and marked everything at least 30 to 40 percent off.
That injunction, effective since January, was in connection with a lawsuit filed by Eugene Johnson’s adult children and grandchildren, who are, in brief, questioning the way Johnson transferred funds during his lifetime between companies belonging to them and to his wife.
Eugene Johnson was the eccentric, Mississippi-raised, overall-clad businessman who sold Johnson’s Crook for development as the Preserve at Rising Fawn but held a mortgage on much of it, making local headlines both when he threatened to foreclose and when he bought up county tax liens on the property to protect his investment.
The lawsuit between the Johnson heirs is slated for trial in spring 2012. Ms. Johnson said she hoped to settle before then but would not otherwise comment on the case.
She was, however, more than willing to talk about Circle A, and to answer a question that had puzzled the Sentinel for years: Why, in the heart of the Deep South, a Western store?
“My husband didn’t invent Circle-A,” said Ms. Johnson. “He bought it.” She explained that Johnson had started the building off Newsome Gap with the idea of using it for a general merchandise store catering to the needs of those who would eventually live in the luxury housing development to be built in the Crook. He planned to sell staples like toilet paper and coffee.
Then, in 2002, a northwest Georgia business named Circle-A happened to be going out of business and he had a chance to buy it cheap. In a move characteristic of him, Johnson snapped it up, moving the inventory to his new Rising Fawn building. “My husband never had a plan,” said Ms. Johnson.
Ms. Johnson herself was heavily involved in the store from the first. Originally from New Jersey, she was a registered nurse who had worked around the United States in various jobs, spending over a decade in Hawaii. After her marriage she planned to keep nursing, but her husband got extremely sick and required her professional attentions himself. Thus she was available for duty when Johnson supplied her with an 18-wheeler and ordered her to go out West and fill it with merchandise for the store.
Through the years Ms. Johnson has clearly picked up some expertise on Things Western: she knows where to order hand-carved teak furniture and how the antler chandeliers that hang from her ceiling are made. “The animals aren’t killed,” she said. “They shed their antlers every so often throughout their lifetime in a particular place, and there are people who go there and gather them and sell them to the lamp makers.”
The Johnsons hoped Circle A would draw customers from people who had built houses in the Crook development – alternately called the Preserve and Wild Moon – and needed to furnish them. But as followers of local news will know, that didn’t happen; building in the Crook effectively stopped in 2009, and the Dade Tax Commissioner’s office announced recently it will auction off unsold lots there for unpaid real estate taxes.
Eugene Johnson had sold the Crook acreage to the Southern Group, a Marion County, Tenn., developer, but current Preserve management, operating the place as a rental-housing resort, has said it represents a new, unnamed group of investors.
Ownership of the large horse arena on Newsome Gap Road has reverted to Deborah Johnson, but otherwise the widow says she owns little at the Preserve besides a couple of cabins and the Waterfall House, which she rents out for events such as weddings.
So Circle A never got much business from the Preserve. Still, says Ms. Johnson, she had a few good customers throughout the area and with those, and the occasional windfall, the store survived. Sometimes a customer who needed, say, to furnish a whole ranch would drop $25,000 on one visit. “Though that didn’t happen very often,” said Ms. Johnson.
In any case, said Ms. Johnson, Circle A provided a handy space for housing the non-Western items her husband sometimes picked up that would not fit just anywhere, such as the 1917 Ford. His reasons for buying some of them puzzled her. Of course anybody would want a Model T, that goes without saying, but what about the turn-of-the-century striped barber pole in full working order? “But why?” Ms. Johnson would ask. Her husband would answer, “Because I want it.”
If you have a similar yen for anything herein described, or would just like to look around, Circle A, located at 1866 Newsome Gap Road in Rising Fawn, is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 1-5 p.m. Sunday, or by appointment, which can be made by calling (423) 421-5095.
Ms. Johnson says she hopes also to sell the building itself, which she thinks would make a good music venue or dancehall, though she doesn’t yet have a price in mind.
But she will keep her farm in Rising Fawn, says Ms. Johnson, where her mother and brother have now relocated to join her. “This is home now,” she said.
Article source: http://www.dadesentinel.com/v2/content.aspx?module=ContentItem&ID=223080&MemberID=1338
